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The pursuit of wisdom at Naropa University means learning both about academic subjects
and about one's own place in the world. The mission of contemplative education—combining
the best of Western and Eastern academic traditions—places Naropa on the cutting edge
of the newest and most effective methods of teaching and learning.

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and 70% of our undergraduates receive some kind of financial assistance.

Naropa University is a Buddhist-inspired, student-centered liberal arts university
in Boulder, Colorado. A recognized leader in contemplative education, Naropa's undergraduate
and graduate programs emphasize professional and personal growth, intellectual development,
and contemplative practice.

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in 1974 as a vision to bring together the best of Western scholarship and Eastern
world wisdom traditions. It combines three distinct educational approaches to deliver
the most innovative liberal arts education in America.

There are tons of ways to get involved, stay in touch and support Naropa. Whether
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Toward a Community that Teaches and Learns

The last time we were all gathered together in a ceremonial context was at last May’s
graduation. For me, that ceremony was one of many highlights of the year and, in
a broader context, was one of the most moving commencements I have ever attended.
It was a fitting counterpart to my first experience in teaching a course at Naropa
last spring: as I acknowledged at commencement, while I had had individual students
who brought a powerful balance of heart and head to their studies before, never before
had I had a whole seminar of them. Not surprisingly, there was also the characteristic
Naropa unexpected twist to the commencement, as the joy and eagerness of the African
drummers and dancers erupted before Reb Zalman’s blessing and the final ringing of
the gong that was in our script: you may have noticed the two of us quickly conferring
and agreeing that this was, indeed, joy abounding and that it would be both inappropriate
and futile to try to reel it back in. In retrospect, I’ve thought that that balance
between orderliness and serendipity isn’t a bad way for a university to run, and that
something quintessentially Naropa happens in the dialectic between the two.

I’ve also had another thought about the spirit that was abroad that day. It was
prompted by knowing that, along with wisdom, contemplative education has compassion
at its heart, compassion arising from awareness of the universality of suffering.
This awareness is, of course, part of Naropa’s Buddhist heritage. The most pointed
application of this awareness to teaching that I’ve heard is actually Jewish and comes
from the Talmud. I first heard it nearly a decade ago from William Schultz, Executive
Director of Amnesty International. In the book of Deuteronomy, at the end of a short
summary of pivotal Biblical teachings comes the phrase: “Place all these things upon your heart.” In the Talmudic commentary a student asks a rabbi: “Why does the text
say on the heart, and not in the heart?” The rabbi replies: “[While we have direct access to the mind,] we do
not have direct access to the inner workings of the heart. What teachers do, therefore,
is to put the teachings on the heart and let them lie there, so that later on, when
the heart breaks, the teachings can pour in and become newly fresh and sensible.”
As the Naropa students crossed the stage and became alumni last May, I thought: “These
women and men are more aware than any graduates in the country of the ache and suffering
that are the lot of all sentient beings. But this also makes them vividly aware and
appreciative when suffering is temporarily in remission, as it is on graduation days,
and so they can celebrate with a whole-hearted abandon that is quite unlike the ego-inflated
rowdiness often associated with commencement ceremonies.” There was a poignancy to
the day’s joy, constructed, as it was, over an underlying bed of compassionate awareness
of sorrow. Here, as on so many other occasions over the year, Naropa took what is
a conventional event or behavior and deepened it into a contemplative experience.

That commencement, of course, came at the end of an academic year and marked our farewell
to those who had studied with us. What might we wish to say now, what signal might
we wish to send, to our students and to each other, here at the beginning of the academic
year? What message do I hope emerges here and in the days just ahead for our life
together—faculty, staff, and students? These first few days of the semester, in and
out of the classroom, are important for launching us on the year on which we’re embarking.
What aspirations might we have for what lies ahead?

In suggesting an answer to that question, I want to take my cue from students. In
my welcoming remarks to new students and their families last week, I cited what I
think is a truly extraordinary statistic. It is one that we all should take to heart.
For a full 95% of our entering undergraduates, Naropa is their first choice in colleges.
A comparable figure applies to our graduate students. There are very few, if any,
colleges that can make that claim. There are lots of reflections one could offer
on this fact. For instance, the nice article on Naropa that appeared in last week’s
US News and World Report juxtaposes this figure with our comparably high acceptance rate to conclude that
our applicants self-select. They have found us out, or our admissions office has
found them out, they have come to understand our mission, and they dearly want to
come to Naropa, seeing it as an oasis in what many have experienced as the desert
of higher education. In talking with the parents of incoming students last week,
it became apparent that for many of their offspring, Naropa was their only choice in schools. (By the way, if you haven’t seen the USNWR article, you can see
it in hard copy in the admissions and president’s office and in the library, and a
copy of the text went by email to all faculty and staff last week. It’s worth reading
as a representative account of how we are viewed on the national scene.)

But I want to take my primary reflection this evening in a different direction. The
fact that 95% of our students have Naropa as their first choice means that, for all
of their effervescent, creative, and often assertive individualism, they have something
in common. This is something that I know at first hand is missing at most other
universities: they have an understanding of the institution’s specific mission that
binds them together across their individual differences. They understand, if only
in part, what Naropa is aspiring to be and they have an anticipation of community,
of like-minded and like-hearted people striving both to develop their individual potential
and to think hard together about how to leave the world a better place than they find
it now. The word “community” comes trippingly off the tongues of students, both new
and returning. My hope for the weeks and months ahead is that we all—faculty, staff,
and returning students—can help our new students create this community for which they
yearn. Notice I do not say help students “discover” community, for that would be
too passive a characterization of what is involved. Community-making is an active
process, not a passive discovery. To be successful, it requires very broad participation.
It implicates all of us.

Before I suggest what might be involved in helping Naropa realize its potential as
a community, let me offer three caveats. First, as Susan Boyle notes in the USNWR
article, we work hard during the admissions process to ensure that students do not
develop unduly romanticized views of Naropa, with impossible expectations. Romanticization
is, of course, a real risk, since Naropa’s vision invites the interpretation that
it is an oasis in the desert. But, as Sakyong Mipham, Rinpoche said almost casually but
with a wise smile, during his Turning the Mind into an Ally retreat up at the Shambhala
Mountain Center this summer: “You know, working with people is really difficult!”
So there will always inevitably be scratchiness in Naropa’s daily life. But, secondly,
this should not deflect us from taking the student challenge to become a community
with utmost seriousness. From my perspective, one of the great strategic discoveries
of last year, particularly during April’s Community Forum, was how passionate students
are about their education at Naropa and what energy they bring to engaging our common
issues. As Naropa addresses the generic problem faced in all colleges and businesses
of having limited resources, we would do well to draw on the resource that student
energy represents. Nowhere is that more true, I believe, than in responding to their
call to realize the potential for becoming a community that lies within our vision
for contemplative education. Thirdly, I know there are physical impediments to a
fully developed communal sense at Naropa, namely, the geographic dispersal of our
three campuses. As reported in my post-Board meeting memo, the Board of Trustees
last May expressed its sense that Naropa would benefit from acquiring property contiguous
with our current holdings and from aspiring to consolidate our properties into two
campuses. These are tall orders, and obviously complex. Please know that we are
continuously on the lookout for ways to accomplish these two goals. In the meantime,
the challenge is on us all to cultivate our sense of community, even if it is primarily
right now only a virtual community. In growing the sense of community at Naropa,
we cannot wait for the arrival of the messiah, that is, having a single campus.

How can we help this happen? How can we all be agents in deepening the sense of
community, the sense of belonging, the texture of our daily lives? Let me offer three
comments.

First, in the search profile that was developed through conversations on campus two
years ago and that Naropa used to advertise the president’s position, note was taken
of the desire to improve communication on campus. Along with others, I have worked
intentionally on this matter over the past year, with varying degrees of success.
Over this same year I have also noted to myself that a common feature in higher education—an
underdeveloped sense of common purpose between faculty and staff members—has its own
manifestation at Naropa. This is, on the one hand, not surprising, given the differences
in how faculty and staff spend their working hours and in their different professional
competencies. But, in meeting with Staff Council late last spring, I found myself
issuing an invitation that, in retrospect, I think is onto something important: I
invited staff members to think of themselves as teachers—not, of course, in the same
way that faculty teach in the classroom, but as conduits of information and as role
models for students in helping them understand what contemplative education means.
In working with students to help us realize the potential for community that lies
implicit in our vision, both faculty and staff play critical roles. But we never
meet together to develop our sense of shared responsibility for working with students
and helping us create that shared sense of community. Just because we are geographically
dispersed, it does not follow that we cannot come together to make common cause at
a single time and place. As we approached the beginning of this academic year and
I reflected on the challenge to a sense of community that having three campuses presents,
I also became aware of two large holes in our calendar: there is no time where we
can welcome the newcomers into our community, faculty and staff; and there is no occasion
during business hours for the president to speak to all who work here, faculty and
staff, about matters affecting our common life together, where we have been, and where
I think we are headed. And so the first faculty meeting of this year will actually
be a joint meeting of faculty and staff. It will be held at Nalanda Campus during
the regular Faculty Council meeting time, Wednesday September 8, with refirst-year
studentsts at 9 a.m., followed by a program that will last much of the morning. Administrative
offices will be closed for that morning, but staff members will be paid as usual with
the understanding that their attendance at the Faculty-Staff meeting is expected.
I anticipate that, as usual, most core faculty will attend this new variation on a
Faculty Council meeting. At this meeting I will speak about my aspirations for the
year ahead, anticipating much that I will say to the board of trustees at their meeting
the following week, Peter Hurst will speak about academic developments, and there
will be structured opportunities to meet the newcomers among us—and perhaps to meet
the oldcomers, since there are lots of not-so-new employees who, because of our dispersed
campuses, are unknown to many of their colleagues. We will begin rectifying this
situation on September 8. Stay tuned for how this will happen. What I can say now
is that word of this meeting will be in everyone’s—all faculty and staff—email inboxes
by tomorrow morning, so that those who are not able to be here this evening are informed
about this impending event. This is an explicit effort on my part to help us head
into the year ahead with a common understanding of what’s on our collective plate
and to build a greater sense of common purpose between faculty and staff, so that
our shared work with students builds an enriched awareness of community, for us and
for them. It is also an effort to be more intentional about the way we welcome new
employees into our midst, and to have some fun along the way. I’m much looking forward
to what will doubtless be another mix of planned orderliness and serendipity. That
will be on the morning of September 8 at the regular meeting time for Faculty Council,
9 a.m., at Nalanda Campus, a joint Faculty-Staff meeting, the first, I believe, in
many years.

My second comment on enriching our sense of community is this. The concept of “contemplative
education” is Naropa’s great gift to the world. It is what drew me to Naropa, what
made the institution appear to me like an oasis in the desert of higher education. Appearances, of course, can deceive,
which is why the word “mirage” is also associated with oases in the desert! But after
a year on the job, I have even more enthusiasm for Naropa’s vision than I did a year
ago. What I’ve gained is knowledge of the institution and its people. What I’ve
lost is inappropriate romanticization. The concept of contemplative education originated
way back in Naropa history, during Judy Lief’s presidency in 1982. It has thus served
as a guiding concept for the past two decades, and I believe it should continue to
be the most succinct formulation of what we are about. I suspect that “contemplative
education” has served us well as our defining feature throughout the 20+ years that
we have used it. But I know that it is absolutely on target for today’s world of education, for today’s youth
culture—and indeed for much of middle-aged culture as well. My evidence for this
is not just the nice things that get said about us, along with the qualifications,
in the USNWR report. It is not just the keen response I get when I talk about Naropa
off-campus, a response that I know many of you get as well. Systematic empirical
evidence for the timeliness of contemplative education also lies in what today’s students
say nationwide. The gold standard for measuring the attitudes of contemporary students
is the annual survey-based reports that have come out of the Higher Education Research
Institute (HERI) at UCLA for the past three decades. Last fall the director, Sandy
Astin, reported on a new survey administered the previous spring, inquiring into how
the college experience affects students’ spiritual lives, and the results were widely
reported in the media. 73% of those polled said their religious or spiritual beliefs
help to develop their identity, 77% said they pray, and 70% believe people can grow
spiritually without being religious. But, at the same time, 62% reported that their
teachers never encourage discussions of religious or spiritual issues, and 53% said
what they learned in the classroom had no effect on their overall beliefs. Astin
commented: “Clearly, there is a misfit here. The survey shows that students have
deeply felt values and great interest in spirituality and religion, but their academic
work and campus programs seem divorced from it.” This, of course, does not describe
Naropa, either past or present. That is why I think Naropa has so much to say to
the on-going development of higher education in America. It is also why Naropa’s
incoming students this fall will, for the first time, participate in the broad-based
HERI survey, on spirituality and other issues, so that we may understand more clearly
how our students compare with their peers across the country. “Contemplative education”
is an idea that arrived 22 years ago, and it is an idea whose time has come even more
today.

That said, I do not think that we at Naropa have yet fleshed out the concept of “contemplative
education” with sufficient specificity to realize its potential, either on campus
or in the broader world of higher education. Crisper articulation of what we are
about under this rubric will serve us well, both in increasing our sense of common
purpose and community, of which it should be the cornerstone, and in articulating
our mission to the world beyond Naropa. Indeed, if we do not do this, our sense of
community will remain no better than it currently is and—since all educators are now
on notice about student interest in religion and spirituality--some other institution
or some broader coalition will come along and, in Peter Hurst’s memorable phrase,
“they will eat our lunch.”

In making this claim, I immediately want to acknowledge something I have learned over
the course of the past year. It is not easy to define this Naropa thing called “contemplative
education.” I grant you that immediately. In fact, long before I came to Naropa
I knew from my own professional study how richly diverse the world’s contemplative
traditions have been. That is part of their power and importance, their fascination
and charm. But they are not, I know, infinitely diverse—and neither can be our understanding
of contemplative education. It is possible to circumscribe the world’s contemplative
traditions, to say what they are not, how they are distinctive from non-contemplative
forms of spirituality and from secular life. I have myself come to think of the world’s
contemplative traditions as having a kind of “family resemblance” between the various
members, a relationship that allows for great but not infinite variety between them
and that yet distinguishes them from other sorts of families. The same, I propose,
should be true for the way we think about contemplative education. I know, of course,
of the faculty’s on-going development of a statement on “The Role of Contemplative
Practice in Education at Naropa University.” I know of the soirees that the Contemplative
Practice Committee has been hosting, and of the powerful personal statements that
have emerged from this activity and others. I know of many individual faculty articles
and presentations. I know that our staff has done something unique among college
staffs by developing a theory for its work, in the document on “contemplative administration.” I know of the conferences
that Naropa has hosted, the Buddhist-Christian dialogues, and the 1997 Spirituality
and Education Conference. But here, as elsewhere in Naropa’s life, our initiatives
have been centrifugal, spiraling away from the center, and diffuse. As a result,
the whole has here, as elsewhere, been less than the sum of the parts. Part of our
strategic thrust in the year ahead must be to become more articulate about precisely
what we mean by contemplative education, using language that is intelligible to those
who might not understand our traditional vocabulary, but who are aware in their own
personal lives of the existential issues that contemplation and contemplative education
can speak to.

In challenging us to become more cogent in how we articulate the meaning of contemplative
education, I do not envision some new project, but a consolidation and focusing of
existing resources. There is therefore a parallel with what I have been urging with
regard to our financial resources: we need to focus on the heart of the matter. To
help us in this task, I am pleased to announce that we are in the process of framing
a “Contemplative Education Initiative” this fall that has as its ultimate aim the
dissemination of 30 years of experience doing what no other university has done, namely,
engaging in university level education with a contemplative base. We will be working
with individuals and committees like Contemplative Practice, to compile an archive
of everything we can put our hands on that has been written or spoken on this topic,
by faculty, staff, visiting teachers, the founder, Naropa leaders, and others. We
will use these materials in many ways, including internal faculty and staff development,
and eventually as a basis for training faculty from other institutions in the ways
of contemplative teaching, so that they may develop their own inner depth and skill
and become resources for students on their campuses. As part of this initiative we
will also be developing one or more research projects on the effects of contemplative
education at Naropa University, possibly including the study of necessary conditions
to support contemplative education. This is an exciting and strategic project, one
that should help us in our internal conversations and in the way we talk to others
about our core activity. We will have more to say about this initiative in the weeks
ahead.

Finally, I want to note that I expect there will be implications of this project for
improving our awareness of living in community. It will help us in working with students
to help build that community. It will do so because, as we hone our ability to talk
about contemplative education, we will be invited to ask ourselves, both individually
and collectively, whether we walk that talk. The language of contemplative education
is admittedly compelling. That’s why so many of us find it so easy to talk about
it at such length! But as we move to crisper articulation of our vision and our intent,
I suspect we will find ourselves looking in a mirror, forced to interrogate our behavior,
in and out of the classroom, in our interactions with students and in our interactions
with one another, whether we be faculty or staff. Do we walk the talk? Do we embody
the ideals of this compelling vision of contemplative education? This is a question
we will face, not just in our individual lives, but institutionally, in thinking about
our policies and practices and how they help (or do not help) students in our shared
task of creating the community that our vision promises. Again, what I have in mind
is not anything new. It already runs through our language. I think of the familiar
Gandhian phrase, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” At graduation you
heard me quote my favorite line from Robert Bellah: “Revolutionaries who do not in
their own lives embody the future cannot bring it.” Last spring, when Dennis Kucinich
spoke here, he gave us the wonderful line: “We are the people we’ve been waiting for!”
In her powerful talk during this past summer’s Summer Writing Program, Sonia Sanchez
challenged her audience: “Try not to turn your tongue against anyone for a whole week.”
And in his talk on the occasion of Naropa’s 30th anniversary last June, the Sakyong
invited us to draw on our inspiration, which he linked to that of the Buddha himself:
no matter what he was doing, the Sakyong suggested, if someone tapped the Buddha on
the shoulder and asked—“What are you thinking about?”—he would answer: “Helping all
sentient beings.” That is walking the talk.

So, as we embark on the year ahead, if we can cultivate a commonality of purpose between
faculty and staff, if we can become crisper in our talk about contemplative education,
and if we can renew our individual and collective efforts to embody our aspirations,
then we shall have taken major steps toward realizing the sense of community that
our students are yearning for and challenging us to create with them. Welcome, everyone,
to this noblest of undertakings!